It is a gorgeous September day. Clear blue sky, sunny, slightly breezy.
“Listen, Mommy,” Eli says.
She listens. The only sound is the swish of the wind pushing the leaves of the swaying Central Park trees.
“I don’t hear anything, Eli.”
“Yeah!” he says. “Someone turned New York off!”
Chloe smiles. It’s true. The streets are still, silent. Down Fifth Avenue, morning light trickles through the side streets to lie warm on the wide avenue in golden stripes.
There is something sad about it, and yet wonderful. Beyond the trees in the distance, the roof of the Plaza Hotel could almost be a Mayan temple. It is as if they have traveled back in time.
Chloe puts her arms around her son. Her small, bright, warm son. For a moment, for the first time in a long while, she feels halfway safe, halfway happy.
She thinks about Oz again. The feel of his back under her fingers, his goofy American laugh.
He is okay. She will see him again soon. She kisses her son, wiping the trembling jewel of a tear from the side of her nose.
The world will not end.
Chapter 92
SPLAYED ON HIS back on a rock outcropping overlooking a softball field near the Central Park carousel, Attila watches a high white cloud sail across the ocean of blue sky above him.
He makes a soft mewling whimper, an almost sigh. His shoulders droop, his muscles slacken. He is serene now.
The massive pack of animals he led into Central Park several nights before has dwindled considerably. First the rats left, and then the cats. There are a few dogs left, but even they are starting to circle in ever-widening loops, wandering aimlessly, like electrons in an unstable atom.
The scent in the air that so strongly compelled Attila to act is weak now, just a tiny trace of what it had been. Wracked, spent, limp with physical exhaustion, he dozes on the sunny rock. The aftertaste of blood in his mouth is strong, metallic, slightly nauseating. All he wants to do now is sleep, sleep, sleep.
He dozes throughout the day, waking occasionally, watching the still and silent city, dozing some more. The soft light on the white buildings. His sweet glassy brown eyes blink languidly. He listens to the quiet. The silence is beautiful. The cool, clean air.
Though he is getting hungry, it is normal hunger. It is not a crazed death hunger. He doesn’t want to kill now. The bloodlust has burned away like a fever. He is healing now.
Soon he sits up as another chimp clambers up onto the rock and sits down beside him. She is a large female who escaped from the Central Park Zoo. She has something in her hand. It is an orange. It is like a ball of flame in her hand, a sun. She peels it with her long fingers and offers it to Attila. Attila breaks it in half and hands the other half back.
Together they eat the orange. The cool, sweet, sticky juice feels good in his mouth. The female cuddles next to him and begins grooming his fur. Soon they are lying there together on the warm stone. Feeling her warmth, and the warmth of the earth, Attila is at peace. He closes his eyes and slips back into sleep.
Chapter 93
TWO MORE DAYS of meetings slid by like sludge. It was difficult to see by lantern and candlelight, and hot indoors, so the meetings were held outside, in the Rose Garden. We sat around the tables on springy metal outdoor furniture, using paperweights to keep things from fluttering across the South Lawn in the breeze.
On the third day, going stir-crazy behind the paper-stacked walls of my dark FEMA trailer and the army compound itself, I canceled my afternoon meetings. I’d heard that D.C. had been free of animal hordes for more than two days now, and I wanted to see firsthand if it was true.
I bumped into Sergeant Alvarez coming out of the compound’s mess tent and convinced him to come with me. When I met him by the northwest gate a few minutes later, he was in full Kevlar and holding a smooth flat black rifle with a cylinder on it.
“How’s the ankle?” I said.
“Getting there. Like my walking stick?” he said, shaking a beast of a weapon. It was an automatic shotgun called an AA-12, he explained, which can fire the thirty-two rounds of double-aught buck in its drum in about an eyeblink at full auto.
“Which is ludicrously destructive when you think about it, but probably just the thing if we run into another tooth-and-claw mob,” Alvarez concluded. “They just handed them out. I named mine Justin.”
“Justin?”
“My man, Justin Case.”
Outside the White House gates, the city appeared peaceful, quiet. The quiet was the most amazing of all. You could hear the wind.
The downtown area was still cordoned off, but they were beginning to allow some residents in to check on their property. We stopped and talked to several people coming in and out of the town houses—a couple of student nurses from Georgetown, an FBI agent, a lobbyist, and her son. It was as though D.C. had become a village.
For now.
I was encouraged that people seemed to be upbeat and cooperative. But I knew this was only the beginning. This was still the honeymoon. How would people feel after a week of no hot showers or air-conditioning? With the country’s dependence on trucking for food delivery, how long would it be before people started getting hungry?
We were on Constitution Avenue when a dog appeared from around the corner. It was a black Lab, and, with knee-jerk immediacy, Alvarez hoisted his new toy to his shoulder, ready to blast the dog to kibbles and bits. But the dog didn’t even glance at us. It passed by in the street, pausing just long enough to relieve itself on a fire hydrant.
Alvarez and I looked at each other. Then we burst out laughing.
“Call the Times. I have tomorrow’s headline,” I said. “Dog pisses on hydrant!”
Chapter 94
THAT NIGHT AND almost all the next day, Charles Groh and I attended romantic candlelit policy meetings with the CDC and various branches of the military. After a quick dinner, I was catching a half nap on a couch in a FEMA trailer parked on the South Lawn when I felt an impish tug on my foot.
I sat up, and NSA chief Leahy sat down beside me. Leahy and the NSA had been put in charge of monitoring the effect of the industrial and power shutdown on the animal populations. I’d been waiting to hear back from him. He smiled enigmatically and handed me a cup of coffee.
“Well, the suspense is killing me,” I said, yawning and taking the coffee. “What’s the story, morning glory?”
Leahy’s smile brightened and broadened.
“Come see, boy genius.”
We left my trailer and headed into another one near the Rose Garden that had a satellite dish wired to the side of it. There was a rattling hand-cranked generator hooked up to the trailer. It was a comm room. There were a dozen techs and military people barking into phones, staring at monitors, pointing at bright shiny things on screens.
Leahy peeled some sheets off a fax machine and handed them to me.
“Feast your eyes on these, Wizard of Oz,” he said. “On the Thursday before the shutdown, we were getting national reports of thousands of attacks every day. Now look at yesterday’s tally in the US.”
I glanced at the sheet.
“Am I reading this right? Three?” I said.
“Exactly,” Leahy said. “Not only that, we’re getting in more and more stories about dogs returning to their owners. The industrial and communications freeze really has knocked out the airborne pheromone. Your plan wasn’t just a home run, Oz. It was a grand slam. You’re going to be very famous. I think you may have just saved the world.”
Leahy put his arm around my shoulder.
“That’s why we’re going to get you out of here, kiddo. I pulled some strings. I’m going to get you back to your family in Nueva York.”
I looked at him. Was that even possible? It felt like weeks since I’d seen Chloe and Eli.
“Surely you’re joking.”
“No, siree. And don’t call me Shirley. They’re gassing up your chariot as we speak. You’re on the G6 again.”
I thought about Chloe, about the actual possibility of touching my wife, holding her, burying my face in her neck. And Eli. I wanted to put that kid up on my shoulders and just walk with him and show him everything that—
I stopped. What the hell was I doing? What was I thinking?
What were they offering? To let me break the rules? And if they “pulled some strings” for me, how many others were they pulling them for?
“Hold it,” I said. “Wait a second. I’d love more than anything to see my family, but it’s too soon. There can’t be any travel now. No combustion engines, no electricity for at least two weeks. That was the plan. You know this.”
“One twenty-minute plane trip won’t break the camel’s back, Oz. You deserve this.”
“Deserve?” I said, feeling a bubble of fury flare up inside me. I grabbed him by the lapels. “That’s Washington, isn’t it? The rules are for the little people, right? We deserve it. Which part of the continuation of civilization do you morons not understand? You think this shutdown is the end? This is the beginning of the beginning of the beginning!”
“Let go of my jacket,” Leahy said.
I shoved him away.
“Do you think this will work without real sacrifice? Without everyone’s sacrifice? The bans on gas, cell phones, electricity—they have to be for everybody. The NSA, the military, VIPs. Hell, even the president and the holy Congress. This is just stage one. Don’t you understand? We have to do this until we come up with a permanent solution.
“If everything goes back to normal, then it’s going to be feeding time again at the zoo, Leahy. You tell all the fat cats to cork the Champagne and cancel the tee times. It’s time to suck it up like the rest of us.”
“Relax,” Leahy said. “I get the picture. I understand. You’re right.”
“Do you? I wonder,” I said as I was leaving. “But I hope so. For the sake of the world.”
Chapter 95
ON SATURDAY MORNING, I blew off every meeting on my schedule. The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works wanted a meet and greet, as did a group of clinical pathologists from the CDC.
But after the row with Leahy, I was almost sick to death of policy makers who were looking at this thing as if it were already over. For them, this was just something they could pad their resumes with, tell their grandchildren about. They needed to understand that if they didn’t take it seriously, there weren’t going to be any grandchildren to tell it to.
Instead, I did something useful, something that needed doing. I signed up to help a contingent of marines clean the streets and collect the bodies of the dead.
There was something turn-of-the-century about it. That is, the turn of the last century. Horses had been brought in from a farm in Rockville, Maryland, to pull U-Haul trailers. By noon, the trailers were laden with body bags.
Having served in Iraq, I thought I could handle the detail. I was wrong. The first child I encountered was a little Asian girl in an alley behind a dry cleaner’s shop in Dupont Circle. She looked about eight, nine years old. Guts strewn across the alley like spaghetti. Sergeant Alvarez and I stuffed her in a bag and laid her down in one of the trailers. It broke me up. I snapped off my reeking rubber gloves and sat on the curb between a couple of parked cars for a while, weeping.
So many lives had been lost.
It was early evening when we arrived at Arlington National Cemetery. Near the Tomb of the Unknowns, the contents of the horse-drawn trailers were unloaded into a row of portable morgue units. An army bugler played taps as we were leaving.
It was getting dark by the time Sergeant Alvarez and I made it on foot back across the bridge, heading for the Marine Corps base next to the White House.
Near George Washington University, we were walking down a block lined with trees and bracketed with quaint homes.
And I saw a chrome-and-yellow Hummer parked on the street, idling in front of a town house. When I reached in and shut off the engine, a tall, handsome guy wearing a Yankees cap and a rumpled blue suit ran out. He looked pissed.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the guy said.
“I should ask you the same thing. Maybe you’ve been under a rock, but there’s a ban on driving.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” the guy said, glancing at Sergeant Alvarez and showing me his ID. “I’m Gary Sterling, congressman from New York. This is my apartment. I’m heading back to Long Island to get a few things.”
“Says who?” I said.
He fished a document out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket.
“Says the president,” he said, making little effort to suppress his smirk.
I looked at the piece of paper. I couldn’t believe it. It was a presidential order that authorized the bearer to operate a motor vehicle despite the ban. I looked at the president’s seal and signature, dumbfounded.
I guess I shouldn’t have been that shocked, but I was. Everyone needs to follow the rules, except for the people who don’t. I knew it. This was D.C. I was afraid this would happen.
Representative Sterling snatched the permit out of my hand and promptly restarted his car. But I couldn’t take it. Permit or no permit, I reached in and shut it down again. I took the keys out of the ignition.
“Are you blind? I showed you the permit,” the congressman said.
I curled my right fist around the keys and raised my left. My fists were shaking. I knew what I was doing was crazy. But I guess I had seen too much that day. I’d seen too many dead bodies. Did this guy care? The answer was no, apparently.
“I don’t give a shit!” I said. “You think the rules don’t apply to you? You’re above it all, right? I don’t think so. Fuck your permit. Come and get your keys.”
And I put them in my pocket.
Then what did he do? He simply turned on his heels and walked back up the town house steps. When he got to the top, he took out a cell phone, hit a button, and began speaking calmly into it.
“What the hell? This fool’s two for two. He’s got a Hummer and a working cell phone?” Alvarez said.
A military Hummer roared up a couple of minutes later. Sergeant Alvarez stiffened and came to attention as a marine colonel climbed out from behind the wheel. He spoke to Alvarez, and then Alvarez very reluctantly spoke to me.
“I’m sorry, Oz, but it’s true. They are issuing these permits, or whatever they are. It’s legit. The asshole wins. You either have to give him back his keys, or I arrest you.”
I bit my lip. I shook my head for a little while. Finally, I stopped.
“Fine, okay. You’re right, everybody. I’m sorry. Got carried away,” I said. The congressman came back down the town-house steps. I walked over to him. I held the keys out to him at the curb. As he reached for them, I flung them aside, into a storm drain.
“Whoops!” I said. “Clumsy me. My arms are kind of tired from carrying the dead all day. Truly, truly: my bad.”
Alvarez, even with the glaring colonel present, was having trouble burying his smile. I walked away, and nobody tried to stop me.
Guy Smiley was beside himself, cussing like a sailor with a toothache, frothing with self-righteous indignation. He gave me the finger.
“Hey, that’s nothing new, is it, Congressman?” I gave him a little feminine wave. “I’m an American citizen. Telling us to go fuck ourselves is what you guys are best at.”
But it was a brief, small victory. As I walked, still seething, in the gloaming, I heard it from all over the city: gasoline generators being started up—air conditioners humming back to life. All the people of the world were back to their old tricks. And I’d thought the bugle was sad.
I realized it then. In the dying purple light as the sun set over Washington, I realized it. I listened to the gathering chatter in the dark, and I knew it.
There would be no recovery. We had lost. It was over.
Chapter 96
BY SUNDOWN OF the third day of the Big Stop, as people have begun to call it, a
loud chugging sound breaks the still, death-like silence in midtown Manhattan. Playing Candy Land with Eli in a pale band of streaming sunlight in the apartment’s back bedroom, Chloe hears it and goes to the window.
She scans the sky over Central Park. The sound picks up volume, and then she sees it. Half a dozen tandem-rotor Chinook helicopters are throbbing over the city, coming in from the West Side. They pass through the gap between the skyscrapers of the Time Warner Center, which stands like a goalpost at the end of Central Park, near Columbus Circle, and continue northeast across the rolling green of the park toward the government Secure Zone.
“No,” Chloe whispers from the terrace. “No, no, no.”
In the sky above them, now there is another roar. A 747 is shrieking westbound, its lights blinking red and green. It’s the first plane she’s seen in a week.
“What is it?” Eli says.
“Helicopters and planes,” Chloe says. “Why are they breaking the ban? It’s been only three days.”
She goes to the terrace. It’s true. Across Central Park West, lights are beginning to twinkle on in the luxury apartment houses, like tiny pieces of luminous candy. She can hear generators whirring on, an ugly, hammering chatter.
Down in the street, she watches as a truck screams onto Fifth Avenue from a side street. Then a motorcycle. Then a Mercedes SUV.
It isn’t just happening in New York, either.
In the absence of animal attacks, people have become emboldened. The air force satellite picks up the imagery as lights start to flicker on in Dallas, in Cincinnati, in Dublin, Milan, Madrid. By the next morning, Beijing smokestacks are throwing up clouds of smoke, fluttering in the air like black satin scarves. The Canadian legislature overturns the cell phone ban. Mexico and the EU follow suit.